Little Scarlet

8

Jesus and Feather were both in bed by eight. She because it was her bedtime and he because he worked so hard. Bonnie and I stretched out on the couch in front of the TV and got reacquainted.

“It sounds so terrible,” she was saying. She had her back against the arm of the sofa and her bare feet in my lap.

“What?”

“The fighting and the violence,” she said.

“I guess.”

“What do you mean, you guess?”

“It’s hot and people are mad,” I said. “They’ve been mad since they were babies.”

“But it’s stupid to attack just anybody because of their skin.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It sure is.”

“Then why don’t you think it’s terrible? I was so frightened for you and the children when I was away.”

I began to massage the joint under her big toe. She always relaxed when I did that.

But Bonnie pulled the foot away.

“Talk to me, Easy. I want to know what you mean.”

“I missed you every night,” I said. “I wanted you in the bed with me. I kept thinkin’ that if you were there, then things would be better.”

“I wanted to be. You know that.”

“Yeah.”

Some months earlier Bonnie had met an African prince and spent a holiday with him on the isle of Madagascar. After I found out she told me that they hadn’t made love, but there were questions we both had afterwards—questions we didn’t have before.

“Pain has a memory of its own,” I said, thinking of Joguye Cham, the African prince, and Nola Payne.

“What do you mean, honey?” Bonnie asked.

“If I was to hit you right now,” I said. “Haul off with my fist and crack you upside your head it would be on your mind for the rest of your life.”

I balled my fist as I spoke. Bonnie leaned down and kissed the big knuckle, then licked it.

“Every day,” I continued, “you’d wonder why I did it and when I might do it again. You’d wonder if you’d done something wrong. You’d hate me but you’d be angry at yourself too.”

“Why would I be angry at myself if you attacked me?”

“If you hit me back, you’d worry that it wasn’t enough or maybe too much. You’d worry that maybe I had a reason to hit you and you just didn’t know what it was. If you didn’t hit me back, you’d feel like a coward or a fool. The pain of that one blow would worm around in your gut and change everything you did from that moment on.”

Bonnie had had her own share of pain in life, I knew that. I didn’t want to bring it up but I felt compelled to explain myself.

“But even if something happens to me,” she said, feeling the hurt as she spoke, “does that make anything I do right? Shouldn’t we decide at some time to let it go and move on?”

“You can’t ever leave something like that behind. You go to sleep with it and you wake up with it too.” I was looking her in the eye then. She wanted to turn away but would not.

“But it’s worse than that,” I said. “For most people the pain they experience is just inside them. I hit you in the head but that’s you and me. You could leave, find another man. You could go to work and none of the other women got a big knot on their heads. But if you come from down in Watts or Fifth Ward or Harlem, every soul you come upon has been threatened and beaten and jailed. If you have kids they will be beaten. And no matter how far back you remember, there’s a beatin’ there waiting for you. And so when you see some man stopped by the cops and some poor mother cryin’ for his release it speaks to you. You don’t know that woman, you don’t know if the man bein’ arrested has done something wrong. But it doesn’t matter. Because you been there before. And everybody around you has been there before. And it’s hot, and you’re broke, and people have been doin’ this to you because of your skin for more years than your mother’s mother can remember.”

There were tears in my voice if not in my eyes and Bonnie was crying too. She put her hands on my forearms letting her heat sink into my skin. We didn’t talk for a long time after that.

“THE POLICE CAME to see me down at the office today,” I said.

We were both undressing for bed.

“What did they want?”

“They want to hire me.”

“No. Why?”

I told her everything from Theodore Steinman’s story to Nola Payne to the cops stopping me and the watchmaker asking for my business.

“Are you going back down there?” she asked when I was through.

“What else can I do? Nobody else can do it.”

“It might be dangerous. You have children.”

I leaned over and kissed her right nipple. She made a sound that told me that she hadn’t realized how much her nipple missed that kiss.

We didn’t talk any more about the LAPD or Nola Payne. Our only words were sweet promises about a world made up of two.